Will the next anti-Duterte rally be AWESOME enough for Millennials?

According to various sources, there will be (yet another) protest rally against the government of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte in the coming days. What are these rallyists going to protest? Duterte’s purported authoritarianism? Martial Law in Mindanao? “Killings” related to his “war on drugs”?

So what else is new?

This is, after all, the era of the millennial A.D.D. generation. There must be something new on offer. The goal of a protest rally after all is to attract attention. Given today’s young attention-deficited electorate, attention is a fleeting asset for players in the attention-seeking industry. Millennials are always in search of the next awesome thing that will interrupt the din of highly-perishable content flooding their social media timelines. In short, this next “big” anti-Duterte rally will perish if it fails the Millennial Awesome Test.

As far as has been observed, the “killings” circuses and violence porn the Opposition has been serving through their various media channels has failed to move nor impress the majority of Filipinos. The media stunts have, in short, not been awesome enough for a generation who rely on Facebook and Google algorithms to tell them what to plant their eyeballs upon and click on “Like” or “Retweet”. The venues, and props of these rallies have, thus far, failed to provide awesome enough backdrops for selfies and poetic enough slogans and sound bytes to quote in status updates.

To be fair, selling violence porn to a people long desensitised to violence is a tough pitch to sustain. Tabloids and TV Patrol have dominated that niche for decades and propaganda campaigns based on politicising “victims” have been worn to tatters over 30 years of Yellow necropolitics and Martial Law Crybabyism. Quite simply, expecting different results whilst doing the same thing over and over again is a fool’s project.

More importantly: To come up with something new and awesome requires imagination.

Unfortunately, because many of the Opposition’s key “influencers” prefer to spend their online days cocooned in their echo chambers, preaching to their choirs of like-minded “followers”, and blocking or “muting” people who disagree with them, they have lost touch with the pulse of the broader audience they should have been chasing. This explains why their rhetoric has failed to evolve from the snoozefest it has become to the awesome propaganda hooks the A.D.D. generation demand. When you are constantly told you are correct, spot on, and awesome by your cherry-picked audience, your creative faculties become deluded and atrophied.

The trouble with Opposition “thought leaders” is that they want their audience to assure them that they are right. They lost the whole point of the game — which is to publish your views so that they are tested by a skeptical audience. The real game in this business is to stress-test one’s points of view. The call to the audience of a truly cluey thought leader is “prove me wrong” rather than “tell me I am right”. You cannot stress-test your points of view when you limit your engagement to within your clique of like-minded folk.

The coming anti-Duterte rallies will likely exhibit again and again the products of liberal and left-leaning activists’ inbred thinking. Indeed, the oxymoronic quality of a protest rally intended to persuade people that Duterte’s government is an authoritarian one flies over the pointed heads of these “activists”. That one can freely rally on Manila’s streets without fear of being arrested, by itself, invalidates that notion even before the placards and pumping fits come out. The Opposition needs to come up with something new to replace the old red herrings that have, for so long, been fodder to their tired rhetoric and street sloganeering. The thing with herrings is that they quickly begin to stink when left out in the sun. And that is not awesome.

Well, they have yet to impress actually… Duterte has basically negated their game by not baiting on with their rhetoric and antics. The police are not even allowed to wield weapons anywhere near them (so basically what they are waiting for is for the police to issue the boot to them so that they can validate “Duterte’s dictatorship” whatever the heck it is they want to call it), and they basically have no right or contention to rant about in the first place. No matter how many days they wish to protest in EDSA. It is an exercise in futility.… Read more »

these coming rallies initiated by the yellow dynasty only shows they’re already in a panic mode ‘cuz their protectors morales and sereno might be impeached and it’s the end of their kingdom. their real motive is to create anarchy. the truth is: The yellows’ rule is over. it’s payback time. they won’t give up on luisita. there’s a curse on that land. it belongs to the farmers since before the spaniards came.

Wow, that word, AWESOME. That’s all they’re after, feeling AWESOME. They may not even be serious about the “advocacies” they claim to support, they’re all about proclaiming to the world that they’re AWESOME.

Rallies are getting obsolete. I wonder why there were no rallies, during the : Hacienda Luisita massacre; Mendiola massacre; Mamapasano massacre; etc…these are massacres, many people were murdered, because of the incompetence of Mar Roxas and Aquino… Not like today, one or two drug dealers, or a teenage drug runner is murdered; and the rallyists, demonstrate and shout: authoritarianism, murders , martial law, etc… It is easy to spot, that some opposition political axis is pulling the strings of these rallyists, to further their political agendas. That is, to remove or impeach Pres. Duterte, and replace him with the Phony… Read more »